Maya 4.(Evaluation)

Alias|Wavefront pursues ease of use

IN THE FEW YEARS that Maya has been around, it has become a 3D modeling and animation package that effects artists rely on heavily for feature film and broadcast production. It seems that every Siggraph we get a new version of Maya with at least one big new feature. But this year, instead of concentrating on a single capability, Alias|Wavefront has consolidated Maya's feature set by offering up a ton of incremental improvements that focus on ease of use.

Maya now comes in three flavors on four platforms: Windows, SGI, Linux, and Macintosh. Maya Builder is the basic version, used mostly for authoring games; Maya Complete is the mid-range product that can perform most modeling and animation tasks; and Maya Unlimited includes advanced features such as cloth and hair.

Alias|Wavefront updated Maya's interface in Version 3, but like the person who can't decide where to put the couch, the company has reorganized and updated the interface again. Menus have been rearranged and consolidated, and the interface looks different. One of the most noticeable changes is that the navigation icons have moved from underneath the toolbar to a vertical column along the left side of the interface. Other improvements include a lasso select tool and new snapping options. These changes work well, and I think the software will help users be more productive.

Maya has historically been a NURBS package. Maya 3 saw the introduction of subdivision surfaces for seamless character modeling. Unfortunately, not all of Maya 3's tools, such as Artisan and Cloth, worked well with subdivision surfaces. Alias|Wavefront has addressed these capabilities with Maya 4, thereby making the software more attractive to those who like modeling and animating with polygons.

Rendering speed has been improved, and so have bump mapping and texture filtering. In previous versions, textures that were rendered at oblique angles, such as on the edge of a sphere, tended to blur. With the improved filtering, textures remain sharp and clear.

Maya still doesn't support global illumination, but Version 4 does have some nice raytracing improvements. One is chromatic aberration, which simulates the way light changes color as it passes through a transparent surface, in much the same way as a prism separates light into a rainbow. Another addition is translucency, which simulates the scattering of light within semi-transparent ...